In her book about Romantic Comedies, Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre, Tamar McDonald contends, “By withholding the revelation of the man’s deceit, the radical romantic comedy can be seen as suggesting both that everyone lives a lie, and that the liar, in the end, is the one who suffers the most” (65). Bret Easton Ellis’ novel, “The Rules of Attraction,” operates off this characteristic, as each of its characters fail to realize their mendacity and malice toward one another. In this way, “Rules” is the most disparaging breed of radical romantic texts in contemporary literature to date. The students at Camden live according to their own self-reflexivity and hedonism, as they strive to find their identities and meanings in a loveless world. Moreover, Spike Jonze’s film, “Adaptation” deals with the same types of characters in the same apathetic and vapid postmodern world that threatens any lasting and meaningful romance…
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